We’re very excited to announce that Modal is opening a London office. It’s our second in Europe, and the beginning of a much larger investment in the region. Europe has incredible talent, amazing startups, and tons of potential for us.
We have actually been in Europe for a while!
Modal has actually been transatlantic for a long time. I grew up in Stockholm, Sweden, went to school there, started my career at Spotify, and moved to the US relatively late in life. At Spotify, I built the recommendation system, used by hundreds of millions of users every day. I also saw Spotify growing from an obscure startup in Stockholm to a massive global public company.
Since the very early days of Modal, we had engineers in Stockholm. Over the years, the team has snowballed to almost 20 people. They build some very core foundational parts of Modal, including our custom file system and big parts of the Sandboxes product.
We're getting even more Europe-pilled today
We’re now expanding to London as well! Hugh Killingbeck-Jones has joined us as VP EMEA to build out our GTM teams in London, covering startups and enterprises. We think London is the AI capital of Europe, and over time this office will grow to include engineering and other functions too.
We’ve seen the new generation of European AI companies take on the hardest problems in their industries across robotics, biotech, health, legal, fintech and build for a global market from the outset. There are so many incredibly ambitious companies, and we think many of them will be using Modal for their infrastructure.
Why Modal? Because we help these companies scale fast and take over the world. Whether they need large scale custom model inference, sandboxes, fine-tuning, training, batch jobs, or many other things. Modal makes it possible to move super fast and not have to think about infrastructure – we give them the primitives they need to build applications, fully flexible resource consumption, amazing developer experience, and much more.
European companies will sometimes have a different set of requirements than US ones, especially when it comes to local regulation. We already support a lot of this, and will be investing more.
The most ambitious teams run on Modal
European AI-native companies like Black Forest Labs and Legora build on Modal, and so do global platforms like DoorDash. Black Forest Labs benchmarks frontier multimodal models across GPU generations. Legora builds agents for the hardest legal work and tests them at scale. DoorDash runs its AI platform across markets.
“We're building frontier visual intelligence, and the sooner we can see and evaluate a new checkpoint, the sooner we can adjust recipes and training. Modal lets us pull in a checkpoint and fan sampling out across as many containers as we need, so eval wall time is minimized and training continues uninterrupted.
— Ruben Rodriguez Buchillon, Member of Technical Staff, Black Forest Labs
“Modal sandboxes give every eval its own isolated environment. We can run thousands of them, trust the results and ship improvements to Legora faster.
— Ebba Helfer, Member of Technical Staff, Legora
We'd love to meet other Europeans!
In London, we’re hiring across sales, solutions engineering, partnerships, marketing and more. We're also continuing to grow our engineering team in Stockholm, with roles open for forward-deployed and system engineers.
In the near future, we’re planning meetups across EMEA (London, Paris, Berlin, Tel Aviv and more), and you'll find us at conferences including:
- AI Engineer Paris
- NVIDIA GTC Berlin
- Slush in Helsinki
If you're building in Europe, you can be running on Modal in minutes. Sign up here. And if you'd rather spend your days helping teams here get models into production, we’d love to hear from you.
